Mining Memories

Or, there might be a monkey driving the bus

I had a dream.

I can’t tell you about the dream because it had real people in it. People I have real relationships with whose complexity doesn’t fit in my dream, because my dream is only my story. A deep truth writ large and vivid enough to wake me in the dead of night.

I imagine that is why people write fiction. To tell the truth of their dreams without the complexity of other people’s stories intruding. I wish I knew how to do that.

But I can tell you this, about when I was young. How young? Young enough that I woke in the night unsettled and lonely, crept down the steep stairs, appeared at my mother’s bedside in the thick, musty, wood-paneled darkness of my parent’s bedroom, and she did not question my presence. She simply skooched over wordlessly toward my father to clear a thin sliver of space for me at the edge of the bed, and then pulled me in against the soft, warm bulk of her. Her loamy, sharp, animal funk surrounded me like a blanket.

I would know her smell even in the deepest dark. Take every other sense away and I would know it. Even now.

Did I sleep, curled up in the warm den of my mother’s embrace? I don’t know anymore. That detail has slipped past the fuzzy edges of my memory and off to wherever all the unnecessary details go. I only know that this is one of the only things I have ever wanted with unending yearning. To be held safe in the dark in the arms of my mother.

One time it happened. It’s like a dream now, but it happened once.

Photo via Knowable Magazine

Now, it isn’t as if my mother never held me other times. She did. But somehow this memory of this night is one that has stuck with me, carrying enormous visceral and emotional weight. So much hunger— for care and comfort, safety and singular attention— lives in this memory. Even now I can feel the gut-deep ache of that hunger, and the relief when it was briefly, beautifully sated.

It was not often sated, that hunger. Can I write that without it sounding like an indictment or an accusation? It is not for me. Instead, it’s simply an honest recounting of my experience of a complicated family. I was loved and also often left hungry, so that grief grew up and twined so tightly around my yearning for nurture, protection, and understanding that it became impossible for me to pull them apart.

I write here about reflecting on our beliefs and working to discern how they are (or are not) expressed through our lives, but if I am honest then I must admit that my choices in many realms of my life are as often fueled by this knotted tangle of longing and heartbreak as any consciously formulated beliefs.

Though it’s less an either/or, as if I am either acting out of my deepest emotions or functioning consciously based on my carefully discerned beliefs, and more like a both/and. Everything is happening all at once. Sometimes they work in concert with each other. My hunger/grief inspires the way I show up for my kids and chosen family. It calls me back to the best in myself so that no one is left wanting for nurture, protection, or witnessing.

But sometimes they function at cross-purposes to each other. I’m moving through my days trying to practice my integrity, thinking I’ve got everything under control, and that heartbroken longing reaches up and snatches the rug right out from under me. Instead of being clear and open-hearted, suddenly I am anxious, angry, grasping, and full of despair. I find myself eating excessively, dreaming vividly, sleeping poorly, and communicating badly. In other words, my choices get real shitty real quick, and it can take days to get back on firm footing again.

A while back I worked on a documentary film project about the nature of memory. Neuroscientific research has shown that one of the surest ways for a memory to get consistently called up in picture-perfect detail is if it is associated with strong feelings. Which means it can also work the other way around. If you want to understand your deepest emotions, mine your memories.

What is your clearest, most visceral memory? When you call it up, what feelings rise up with it? How do those feelings show up in your life now?

Investigating our strongest memories, and the feelings that arise out of them, is as important to our integrity practice as anything else, I think. They tell us who we are, where we come from, and why we do so many of the things we do. None of us live our lives entirely intentionally, making only conscious choices all day long. Instead, our emotions often drive the bus. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but it’s worth figuring out who’s driving, don’t you think?

I hope we can all agree, neither of these two should be driving.